Back in 2019, when then-candidate Joe Biden was campaigning on the promise of restoring “normalcy” to American politics after three years of almost daily scandal and chaos in the White House, he made a prediction that would regularly come back to haunt him after becoming president. “The thing that will fundamentally change things,” said the former vice president at a campaign event in New Hampshire, “is with Donald Trump out of the White House. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”
This was a remarkable statement coming from the man who had served eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama, whose administration faced unprecedented levels of Republican obstructionism throughout most of his two terms. But it was also consistent with the former veep’s lifelong faith in bipartisan cooperation. Biden’s view of politics had been shaped by the nearly four decades he spent in the Senate, where he frequently worked with his Republican colleagues on bipartisan legislation (for better or worse). As a creature of the world's “greatest deliberative body,” Biden had always seen politics as an art of the possible, with compromise — not conflict — extolled as the highest principle. As journalist Franklin Foer elaborates in his acclaimed book on Biden’s presidency, The Last Politician, politics for Biden is the “means by which a society mediates its difference of opinion, allowing for peaceful coexistence.” By this definition, it is an “ethos that requires tolerance of competing truth” and a “set of rules whereby the side that fails to prevail in democratic decision-making accepts its defeat.”
